Current Affairs

by Charles

In the last few weeks, I’ve been mulling over the idea that Islam is not a religion of peace, but of submission, by its very definition.  It is a noble concept for a person to voluntarily submit himself or herself to God and to put into practice the tenets of the faith.  But it’s another thing altogether when a person decides that others must also submit.  When self-described Muslims decide to militantly force their religious ideology down others’ throats, then we have a War Against Militant Islamism.

While we’ve long heard and read from many on the Left about American imperialism and hegemony, there is also an imperialism problem with large numbers of Muslims throughout history, as documented by Efraim Karsh of the University of London.  The history of Islamic imperialism and subjugation neatly play into current events.  For instance, just in the last week or two:

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by hilzoy

Via the invaluable Elizabeth Warren: a new report from RealtyTrac:

“RealtyTrac™ (www.realtytrac.com), the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, today released its 2006 Q1 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, which showed that 323,102 properties nationwide entered some stage of foreclosure in the first quarter of 2006, a 38 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 72 percent year-over-year increase from the first quarter of 2005. The nation’s quarterly foreclosure rate of one new foreclosure for every 358 U.S. households was higher than in any quarter of last year.”

Foreclosures up 38% from last quarter, and 72% from the first quarter of last year? Yikes. (And this has nothing to do with Katrina. RealtyTrac breaks the figures down by state, and foreclosures are way down in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.)

This fits in with one of my preferred economic nightmare scenarios, which goes like this:

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by hilzoy

I think I might have been too hasty a few days ago, when I wrote that it was good news that Nigeria had decided to turn Charles Taylor over to a human rights tribunal in Sierra Leone.

This is one of those issues, like not negotiating for hostages, in which it’s impossible not to be torn between one’s views about the individual case and one’s views about the right general policy to have. On the one hand, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to rejoice when any hostage is freed. On the other, if a hostage is freed because the hostage-takers managed to get what they wanted, that encourages people to take more hostages, and who could possibly want that? And this is not a question of caring more for general rules than for flesh-and-blood human beings: any hostages who are taken in the future will be just as real as those whose release is negotiated, and they are just as likely to have friends and family who suffer enormously when they are taken, and who are desperate for their release.

Similarly here. Who could possibly not want to see justice for the man whose ” crimes include the incitement of wars in four West African countries; the enslavement, rape or dismemberment of thousands of children; and collaboration with al Qaeda”? Or, to make the point another way, who is responsible for things like this:

(© Sebastian Bolesch/DFA/Still Pictures)?

Or this?

(Note: these pictures are from the civil war in Sierra Leone, which Taylor is accused of having incited, and in which a lot of children were conscripted as soldiers, and a lot of people were mutilated by Taylor’s side. I said ‘things like this’ because I don’t know that he is responsible for the kids in these specific pictures.)

But*…

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by hilzoy

For as long as I can remember, the degree to which our country is separated along class lines has really bothered me. It’s not just possible but easy for people who are, say, upper middle class to have virtually no opportunity to talk to people who are poor, except during commercial transactions (getting a meal at a fast-food restaurant), or when a homeless person asks them for money, or during some similarly impersonal encounter; and it’s equally possible for those who are poor not to have any meaningful contact with people who are well off.

Obviously, this matters for politics. If someone proposes a law that would primarily affect people I’m familiar with — philosophy professors, for example — it’s relatively easy for me to figure out its pros and cons. But if someone proposes a law that would primarily affect people I’m not familiar with — native Alaskans, say (in my case) — it’s an awful lot harder. So to the extent that we don’t know anything about whole groups of people, we’re likely to make much worse policy. Thus, one of my mottos has always been: cross class boundaries whenever you can. (Not, I want to add, as a sort of socioeconomic tourist; there are all sorts of other ways to do this. Working in the biker bar and in the battered women’s shelter were two of mine.)

I was thinking about this because I happened to be looking at income statistics (pdf) recently, and found that while I can imagine living on the 2004 US median household income — after all, my household consists of me and my two cats — I had a very hard time imagining managing with that income if I had a family. And I’m not nearly as fussy as, say, Tom DeLay, who once said: “I challenge anyone to live on my salary”, at a time when his salary was $158,000 a year. I do just fine on a lot less than that. As I said, I’d do just fine on our median income, as long as I didn’t have a spouse, children, or anyone else to divide the money with. Moreover, I have in my time been pretty broke, so it’s not that I just haven’t ever had to try. (The period when I was supporting myself by throwing newspapers leaps to mind. $425/month income; $225/month rent; the remaining $200 for food and gas — and gas is a necessity when your job is delivering several hundred papers a day with your car.) But I have a hard time imagining living on that income if I had, say, a family of four. And yet half of all households, presumably including a lot of families, manage to do just that.

And if that’s hard to imagine, I really, really can’t imagine surviving at the poverty level.

So here’s the pop quiz:

(a) What was the US median income for households in 2004? (For those of you who have forgotten stats: if you took all the households in the country and lined them up from richest to poorest, the income of the household in the very middle is the median income. 50% of the population makes less; 50% makes more.)

(b) What is the median income for a male full-time, year-round worker? For a female? (The figures I have are broken down by gender.)

(c) What was the poverty threshold for a family of four (two parents, two kids) in 2004? (The poverty threshold is the point below which a family officially counts as living in poverty, according to the US Census Bureau.)

(d) What percentage of Americans lived at or below the poverty threshold?

(e) What percentage of American children under 18 lived at or below the poverty threshold?

(f) What percentage of workers over 16 live below the poverty threshold?

You don’t need to give your actual answers; just see how accurate they are. I’ll be curious: I’m not posting this because I assume anything one way or the other about the results, but because I really have no sense at all of how accurate people’s views about this are, and I thought it would be interesting to find out for the unrepresentative sample that is our readership.

Answers below the fold.

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by hilzoy

As I wrote last night, a lot of cases of what seem to be plagiarism by Ben Domenech have been found by various bloggers. (Comprehensive list here.) I’ve already said what I have to say about the plagiarism itself; and now, while Domenech has not (apparently) admitted wrongdoing, he has resigned. I now want to focus on the response by bloggers on the right.

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by Charles

Afghanistan.  The trial of Abdul Rahman is an important test case for the Afghan government.  Rahman converted from Islam to Christianity sixteen years ago, but adversarial family members recently ratted him out, notifying the authorities of his switch.  Under sharia law, he could face the death penalty.  The Afghan Constitution is dissonant on the issue, expressly upholding Islamic principles but also incorporating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The outcome of the case will tell us whether the current Afghan regime is moving in the direction of Taliban II or toward a free and democratic society.  Quite frankly, the United States should not let a Rahman conviction stand.  We have too much invested in this country to let this evil affront to civilization happen.  The state prosecutor may have an out, though, declaring that Rahman may be "mentally unfit" to stand trial.  The state prosecutor has more evidence on the mental unfitness of jihadist loony tunes than Rahman, but if that’s what it takes to get out of an embarrassing situation, so be it.

Iraq.  Just as the three previous elections were pivotal moments in Iraqi (and American) history, so is the formation of its new government.  The longer it stays in limbo, the more tenuous the situation becomes.  By way of Winds of Change, British Defence Minister John Reid is concerned that delays allow terrorists and rejectionists more opportunities to destabilize.  Me, too.  I wish I could think of the right analogy, but each successful event in post-Saddam Iraq is merely one step forward to a free, peaceful, non-theocratic representative republic.  If such event fails, or fails to happen, then we move six steps backward.  This is looking like one of those moments where one more step must be had.  If not, those terrorists, rejectionists and others agitating for civil war may just get one.

Iran.  With EU3 negotiations gone nowhere and discussions underway in the UN Security Council, the next step toward stopping Iran from having an atomic bomb is direct meetings between American and Iranian officials.  The Mullah Supreme (Khameini) is amenable to talks with the United States, and we should take him up on his offer.  If Iran gets to a point where we must decide to strike or not to strike, we should be able to say that we’ve tried every avenue of recourse.

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by hilzoy

Glenn Greenwald has written another great post (actually, a lot of them, but this is the one I’m writing about.) He’s writing in response to a post by Captain Ed, who claims that “FISA came into being to regulate peacetime surveillance by the federal government, as an antidote to Nixonian abuses of power that had nothing to do with the conduct of war.” Greenwald notes that that’s not true, since FISA contains an entire section called “Authorization during time of war”; and since it was passed in response to Nixon’s spying during the Vietnam war, not during peacetime. (In an update, Captain Ed acknowledges this.)

But Greenwald then adds this:

“But beyond these self-evident factual errors in Captain Ed’s argument is a more fundamental and pervasive falsehood which is being peddled with increasing frequency to justify the Administration’s law-breaking. It is the notion that restraints on the Executive Branch generally, such as those mandated by FISA or ones prohibiting the incarceration of Americans without due process, are now obsolete because they were the by-product of some sort of peaceful, enemy-less, utopian era which no longer exists.

This world-view is staggering in its revisionism. FISA was enacted in 1978. I did not think there were many people, if there were any at all, who actually believe that 1978 was a time of “peace.” Most people — and I would have thought this was true particularly for “conservatives” — tend to see that period as the height of a war which we call the “Cold War,” where we faced an “Evil Empire” trying to achieve world domination in order to impose its tyrannical ideology. In fact, we spent the entire decade after the enactment of FISA engaged in a massive build-up of our military forces, and we even tried to find a way to build a space-based shield around our country in order to repel incoming missiles. Accordingly, how can it possibly be argued that Americans banned our Government from eavesdropping on us in secret only during times of peace?”

This is true, and it’s important. I was thinking of it a few weeks ago. I was eating lunch, turned on CSPAN, and as luck would have it, a speech by President Bush was on. I usually find the President’s speeches unwatchable, since they consist of sentences like “You know, what some people don’t understand is, our enemies are really bad people.” But on this occasion, for whatever reason, I watched it. And what struck me was that if I had no knowledge whatsoever of current events — if, for instance, I had just beamed in from another galaxy — he might sound persuasive. As it was, though, it was so completely detached from reality that it was downright surreal. And so I kept listening, in wonderment, as this speech appropriate to another world entirely moved from one bizarre claim to another, leaving me wondering whether it was me or the President who had gone through the looking glass.

And what started me wondering was this statement:

“You know, a lot of us grew up thinking that oceans would protect us; that if there was a threat overseas, it really didn’t concern us because we were safe. That’s what history had basically told us — yes, there was an attack on Pearl Harbor, obviously, but it was a kind of hit-and-run and then we pursued the enemy. A lot of folks — at least, my age, when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked. And in that we got attacked, I vowed then, like I’m vowing to you today, that I understand my most important priority. My most important job is to protect the security of the American people.”

Just savor this bit: “when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked.”

That just can’t be true.

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by hilzoy

President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are forever lecturing people who disagree with them about their pre-9/11 way of thinking. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what on earth they could be talking about. A post 9/11 mentality would, I would have thought, involve a relentless focus on attacking both terrorist organizations and the causes of their appeal, not haring off on unrelated and ill-thought-out adventures like Iraq. It would involve concentrating our resources on actually catching Osama bin Laden, not letting him slip away at Tora Bora in part because our military was already distracted by planning for Iraq. It would involve trying to secure loose nukes in places like Russia, and keeping non-nuclear countries from developing nuclear weapons, not ignoring North Korea’s extremely dangerous nuclear program — from which terrorists are far more likely to get nukes than they ever would have been from Saddam — while trying to convince the country that a country with no nuclear weapons threatened us with a “mushroom cloud”. It would have involved deft, quiet, and forceful efforts to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, not the sort of wishful thinking that led people to say that ‘the road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad’, and to bring about reform in states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It would, in short, have been diametrically opposed to everything this administration has done.

At home, it would have involved moving heaven and earth to ensure that our ports, bridges, railways, and chemical plants were secure. This administration has barely scratched the surface of those tasks. And it would have involved making a major effort to ensure that if some natural or man-made catastrophe struck again, we would be as well-eqipped to deal with it as a rich and powerful country can be. But as Katrina made painfully clear, we are not.

On Constitutional issues, I agree with Russ Feingold: the Bush administration has a pre-1776 mentality. But even on preventing and preparing for terrorism, I can’t imagine how they could possibly be more pre-9/11 than they are.

This rant was prompted by a story in the Washington Post, about a House report on the response to Katrina. As I read it, I kept thinking: this is the sort of response we could expect to a terrorist incident. It happened four years after 9/11, but as far as the Bush administration’s disaster planning and preparedness are concerned, 9/11 might as well never have happened. Either this administration just has not been trying to prepare for the next catastrophe, or it is completely incompetent, or both. In either case, it is living in a pre-9/11 world — a world in which, apparently, we don’t need to bother with boring things like disaster preparedness, we can afford to place incompetent people in charge of them, and we don’t have to bother to exercise actual leadership in times of crisis.

The report in question is by the House Republicans, who have not been known for their combative and confrontational attitude to this administration. Excerpts from the story, and more comments, below the fold.

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by hilzoy

The Washington Post has an excellent story on the NSA wiretap program today. It’s worth reading in its entirety, since it has a lot of interesting details. Among the highlights (note: while the first quote here is from the beginning of the article, some of the rest appear here in an order different from that found in the article. I.e., each passage is quoted verbatim and with relevant context, but the second passage I quote appears after the third in the article itself.):

“Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.

Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as “terrorist surveillance” and summed it up by declaring that “if you’re talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why.” But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.

Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.

The Bush administration refuses to say — in public or in closed session of Congress — how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.

The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.”

This is predictable.

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by Charles

In thinking about an Iran with enriched uranium and atomic bombs in the near future, all sorts of questions have bubbled to the surface.  The answers are my best educated guesses.  If you have different answers, tell my why. I’m just trying to mentally work this through.  In no particular order:

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by hilzoy

I remember the day my attitude towards William Weld shifted from a mild dislike to active antipathy. It was back in the mid 80s, when Weld was Governor of Massachusetts. He had recently proposed a drastic change in Massachusetts’ housing policy, which, many people feared, would lead to a lot of people winding up homeless. (I think it was a drastic curtailment of section 8 funds, but I could be wrong. I was spending a lot of time with housing policy wonks back then — a bunch of very smart, very well-informed people, mostly centrists, to whom good evidence-based policy mattered a lot more than ideological correctness — and they were all terrified about what the change would do.) One day Weld was asked about the possibility that his program would leave a lot of families homeless, and he said, in this absolutely cavalier way, that if it turned out that a lot of people were thrown out onto the street, he’d just change the program back the next year. (The ‘cavalier way’ is crucial here: I could imagine someone expressing doubts about the program, and explaining why he’d chosen to support it in a way that did justice to the problems it might cause. That would not have disturbed me in the same way. What bothered me was that Weld’s response was not thoughtful; it was flippant.)

As though just changing the program back again would be enough. As though that would make things all better again.

I thought: consider a family who were, as they say, working hard and playing by the rules, who were just barely making ends meet with help from Section 8 (or whatever it was), and who, as a result of this change, lost their home. Consider the effects on their children, who have to try, somehow, to get their homework done in a van or a homeless shelter. Consider the fights that might erupt between the parents as a result of the stress and misery of trying to figure out how to keep their family together on the streets. Marriages break up over less, and it’s hard to imagine that the stress alone wouldn’t take a serious toll on everyone around, including the kids. Consider the humiliation, for the parents, of having to take their kids to shelters and food banks, and the cost to the kids whenever one of their classmates asked: so, where do you live? (This is supposing they stayed in school. If not, consider the cost to them of dropping out or missing large chunks of school time.) Consider the impacts on their health of life on the streets. Think of all the damage that living on the street would do to a family.

Now imagine William Weld saying: Oops! my bad!, and changing the program back. This family might reapply for assistance, and in a few years might get it. But an enormous amount of damage would have been done to them in the meantime. Life on the streets is not good for anyone, especially for children. You don’t have to be some sort of miracle of empathy to recognize this. And the contrast between the thought of that damage and Weld’s completely cavalier attitude to it just enraged me.

I feel the same way about Medicare Part D. Because a lot of the damage that will be done to people as a result of Medicare Part D is like the damage done to a family by becoming homeless in this respect: you can’t just wave a magic wand and make things better again once you realize your mistake. The damage is permanent, and it cannot be undone. And that makes the thoughtless, cavalier way in which this policy was written and adopted completely outrageous.

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by hilzoy

As I’m sure you all know by now, the introduction of Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit has been an unmitigated disaster. As of last Saturday, a dozen states had declared public health emergencies because of it, and over twenty have stepped in to make sure seniors get the drugs they need. The new benefit is unbelievably confusing. One of the main reasons for choosing one of the plans it offers over others is that that plan covers all the medications you’re actually taking; yet while the insurers who offer those plans can change which medications they cover every month, seniors are locked into those plans for a whole year. And, my favorite detail of all, the government is forbidden to either compete against private companies by offering its own plan, or to bargain for lower prices on drugs.

The rollout of the plan has had its own share of problems. “Dual eligibles” — those who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid — have thus far had their prescriptions covered under Medicaid. Now, all of them have been enrolled in one or another plan, and will supposedly be exempt from many of its costs. The trouble is that neither the information about their new plans nor the fact that they are eligible for low co-pays seems to have found its way onto the system’s computers.

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by hilzoy

The NSA program to eavesdrop on American citizens was, according to George W. Bush, a limited program that only monitored the phone calls of genuine, certified Bad People:

“This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner,” he told reporters. “These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches.”

And:

“”If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we’d like to know why.””

Apparently, the FBI agents who had to track down the leads generated by the NSA wiretaps saw things a bit differently:

“In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans’ international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about “whether the program had a proper legal foundation,” but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a “vital tool” against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved “thousands of lives.”

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

“We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism – case closed,” said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. “After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.””

And for this it was worth violating the privacy of an unknown number of Americans, instructing government agencies to violate criminal law, and asserting that the President has powers more commonly associated with dictators? Sheesh.

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Even though intellectually, I know I might lose this argument, if I’m honest, I have to admit that viscerally I object to the mass media public humiliation of people arrested for lewdness. I know plenty of people believe it’s a good deterrent to breaking laws against such behavior, but given these folks will have enough shame and guilt to deal with in explaining to their families and workplace, it seems overkill in the deterrent department.

Recently the pastor of a Tulsa church was arrested for propositioning a male police officer posing as a prostitute. The media are running stories on it and trying to highlight the hypocrisy of it because he’s made anti-gay-marriage statements. You can google the story based on the info I’ve provided, if you want to, but in the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, I won’t add to this poor guy’s public scolding, at least not by name.

What made me think it’s time to voice my objection to the practice of public humiliation via mass media were the details of his case. He apparently had spoken out against same-sex marriage (but then so have some known homosexuals), but he also supported a Southern Baptist Convention directive urging its 42,000 churches to befriend gays and lesbians. Of course he reportedly encouraged that in order to try to convince gays that they can become heterosexual "if they accept Jesus Christ as their savior and reject their ‘sinful, destructive lifestyle,"’ which I object to because it’s harmful and wrong-headed, but it seems to me this fella may have really just wanted to believe that might be true too much more than he wished to harm anyone else. I can only imagine the loneliness that drove him to proposition someone he thought was a prostitute.

Of course, I’m projecting here, but my propensity for empathy is why I find the high-tech Scarlet Letter approach so obscene.

This next example is tougher because it includes people who might have actually hurt children, but still we recently watched in horror as NBC’s increasingly sloppy and sleazy journalistic offering, Dateline, aired a hidden camera investigation where they sent folks pretending to be under-aged children into chat rooms who eventually gave the address of the home where they had the cameras set up as a rendezvous point. Once someone entered the home, NBC ambushed them and recorded their excuses for being there. Now, of course, any adult who would actually show up needs to be watched carefully and possibly arrested, but what made NBC think it was their right to air their faces and voices before these folks had been officially accused of or convicted of a crime? Seriously, we were as equally disgusted with the reporting as we were the men who showed up. In fact, we were so disgusted by the reporting it made us feel somewhat sorry for the men who showed up, and so no degree of trying to excuse the reporting as a public service holds water IMO.

The police are professionals. I know they often use the media to help them do their jobs, but there are certain aspects of believing that someone is innocent until proven guilty that demand we let the police do their jobs with some degree of privacy for the accused and even the convicted. Yes, the public has a right to know when someone has been accused/convicted of a crime, but there should still be some degree of dignity (for ourselves, at least, if not the accused) that accompanies the distribution of such information.

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by Edward_

Personal note: Not sure how long I’ll be able to blog again, but will try for as long as my current circumstances hold out. It’s very nice to be able to, all the same.
e_

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We went to see two films over the holiday weekend. One is highly controversial and, we knew before we went in, incredibly sad. The other we thought was going to be a much needed dose of comedy to lighten our mood after the first one, but turned out to be incredibly thoughtful as well. We didn’t realize that the second film offered the near opposite vision from the first for what it means to be gay in America. The films were "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Family Stone." I don’t think I’ll forget either one for many years to come.

The "gay cowboy" movie as our pathetic excuse for a national media has taken to calling it is, as you’ve read or seen for yourself, incredibly beautiful. If your heart doesn’t ache at the end of this film, you might just be dead.

"Brokeback Mountain," in and among other themes of longing and true love, explored the worst of being gay in America. The loneliness, the duplicity, the violence, the self-loathing, the heartbreak, the bigotry, and the wasted years. I know there are many Americans, like Larry David (you have to read this, it’s amazing), who refuse to go see this film. It’s their loss. They’re denying themselves one of our country’s most exquisitely told, most human of tales.

"The Family Stone," in and among other themes of the power of family and familial love, explored the very best of being gay in America. The gay son (and his lover) wants to adopt a child, is as welcome as any other of the four siblings with their significant others in the parents’ home, and in one incredibly well-written scene that exposes the soft bigotry that underlies so much of the so-called "tolerance" toward gays in this country, is told by his mother in front of everyone that he is more "normal" than any other person in the house.

I don’t want to spoil either film if you haven’t seen them, but I do want to discuss how these films work to dispel the myth that gay marriage is somehow "anti-family."

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